Elastic Security

Scripting is indispensable to automate IT infrastructures. IT automation gets even more important when resources are run in cloud infrastructures due to higher frequency of changes: usecases include scaling up to cope with peaks of load, scaling down to more efficiently use resources, or temporary usage for developing, testing, or rolling out marketing campaigns. There are a couple of commercial (e.g. RightScale) and open-source solutions (e.g. Chef) with quite impressive capabilities, which also require some significant effort to learn correct usage.

However, we found that sometimes we only need to run a script once. For example, we wanted to encrypt an EBS storage for an instance or create a bootable instance from a snapshot. We packed our scripts into an open-source project (written in Ruby) and wrote an easy-to-use web-application called Cloudy_Scripts that presents the necessary input information in a form and provides status updates and log-messages to track progress. Cloudy_Scripts does not require registration, credentials for the cloud providers are not stored anywhere. The scripts basically use the cloud provider API and ssh-wrapped bash-commands to fulfill their goal. We start with two scripts for now.

Please let us know if Cloudy_Scripts is helpful for you, if there are other scripts you would like to be added, if you detect bugs or flaws, or if you want to participate in the open-source project.

Filed under: Internals, Solutions, Cloudy_Scripts